Starfleet Status Report: 2025
Year-end studio updates, system recalibrations, and art prints in the queue for 2026.
As 2025 closes, I’m feeling deeply grateful for the people who made room for my work this year. If you followed along, encouraged me, shared a post, or brought a painting into your home, thank you.
This time of year always feels like a threshold, which makes it a good moment to log what actually happened. Here’s a changelog of what 2025 held for me.
I was busy.
Starfleet Status Report: 2025 Studio Changelog
✅ Visibility / Recognition (signals received)
Self-Portrait in Braces was shortlisted for the 2025 International Biennial Portrait Competition and exhibited at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art (July 8–September 27, 2025).
Submitted work to multiple juried exhibitions and open calls to widen the orbit of visibility.
Began a new gallery partnership!
✅ Studio / Sales (momentum confirmed)
Sold more paintings than in any previous year.
Sold my largest painting to date: 64 × 36 inches (163 × 91 cm), a moment where scale finally matched impact.
✅ Infrastructure / Systems (station upgrades, mostly complete)
Migrated my newsletter and subscribers from Mailchimp → Substack.
Maintained a regular newsletter cadence (more or less), reliable enough to feel like a practice.
Established Dispatches from the Liminal Bathroom as a coherent publication—developing a unified voice and style, an intentional tag system, and a durable narrative structure for reflection, fieldnotes, and the connective tissue between paintings. The broader publication and brand system (voice, vibe, style, structure, and CTA logic) is now largely in place; consistency remains an active mission.
Refactored and redesigned my Webflow website, incorporating a design system and new scaffolding (built on Finsweet’s Client-First guidelines), so layout, components, and class structure are consistent and easy to maintain.
Implemented Webflow E-commerce and migrated Square E-commerce → Webflow.
Deepened my Webflow expertise through ongoing contract work in design and front-end development for client sites, incorporating Webflow’s native AI tooling into design and interface workflows to support both my studio practice and my income.
Further explored and integrated generative AI into my practice as a studio tool across visual, textual, and audio experiments, using it for ideation, concept development, reference-building, planning, visual refinement, structural thinking, and editorial refinement in ways that support clarity and momentum while keeping the work distinctly my own.
❌ Unshipped cargo (still in orbit)
Integrate The Print Space API for selling art prints.
Offer art prints on the website.
Looking Ahead to 2026
Next year, I’m opening a new doorway: art prints.
I genuinely meant to have them ready this year, but the integration work (and the focus it requires) didn’t get the time it needed. In 2026, I intend to integrate The Print Space API into my website so I can offer museum-quality giclée art prints—archival, color-accurate, and professionally produced—delivered directly to you. These initial prints will be open editions, starting with a small curated selection. I’ll announce each drop here in the newsletter.
Alongside prints, 2026 is about solving a visibility problem. I’ll be developing a clear, sustainable plan for how my work moves through the world, a strategy that treats this newsletter as the hub and brings more intention to how the work circulates, so it can be found by the people it’s meant for.
A Simple Wish for the New Year
I hope 2026 offers you clearer signals, kinder inputs, and a few reminders that ordinary kindness is still in circulation. May you also get days that feel like they actually belong to you, and at least one excellent cup of coffee you won’t forget.
Have a happy New Year, and thank you for being here!
With gratitude,
Shelli
Can't wait to see the prints! Happy New Year!